From time to time, the OTW will be hosting guest posts on our OTW News accounts. These guests will be providing an outside perspective on the OTW or aspects of fandom where our projects may have a presence. The posts express each author’s personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. We welcome suggestions from fans for future guest posts, which can be left as a comment here or by contacting us directly.

Foz Meadows is a genderqueer author, blogger, reviewer and poet. Her most recent novels are An Accident of Stars and A Tyranny of Queens, and she also enjoys writing fanfic. You can find her on Twitter and Tumblr.

How did you first get into fandom and fanworks?

It’s somewhat tautological to say that being a fan was what brought me into fandom, but that’s kind of the way it goes: if you love something enough, persistently and vocally enough, then sooner or later, you run into other people who love it, too. In my tweens and teens –- which is to say, in the late nineties/early noughties –- online fan communities were still pretty new, and having the internet at home was still a novelty. I didn’t have any idea that fandom, as a collective thing, existed; I just knew what I liked. My friends and I would co-write Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time fanfic by cramming around a single computer; I’d wait patiently through the interminable load-times of our 56k dialup connection to look at fanart on Elfwood, often getting book recommendations from user profiles in the process; I hunted down more than one Dragons of Pern website to create my own Anne McCaffrey characters and attempt to download tiny, early gifs of collectible dragons; and I definitely wrote a few Quistis x Irvine FFVIII fics on the privacy of my old desktop, but I never had a language for what all that meant beyond “I like this stuff, it’s fun.”

I never stopped loving stories that way, but it wasn’t until I fell into Supernatural that I came into modern fandom proper and realised there were whole communities founded on sharing that passion. Say what you will about Supernatural and its hardcore dedication to pairing the sublime and the ridiculous: it’s so absurdly long-running that the process of creating, consuming and collaborating around it has, I would argue, had an impact on myriad wider fannish practises.(more…)

The essays in this March 15, 2018, issue focus on Social TV Fandom and the Media Industries, guest edited by Myles McNutt.

This exciting issue contains essays about Sleepy Hollow, The 100, Wynonna Earp, and Twin Peaks: The Return fans and fan engagement. To discuss the “social” in “social TV,” contributors discuss use of Twitter, #hashtags, and emoticons. Also featured is an interview with Flourish Klink of Chaotic Good Studios.

The next issue of TWC, No. 27, is a guest-edited issue on Tumblr and Fandom. It will appear on June 15, 2018.

We welcome Symposium articles for our 10th anniversary issue, which focuses on the Future of Fandom.

TWC’s current calls for papers include the following issues (more info at Announcements):

General Issue with emphasis on The Future of Fandom, September 2018 (CLOSED, email us for Symposium)

Romance/Fans: Sexual Fantasy, Love, and Genre in Fandom, March 2019 (CLOSED, email us for Symposium)

Fans of Color, Fandoms of Color June 2019 (CLOSED, email us for Symposium)

Fan Fiction and Ancient Scribal Cultures, December 2019 (submissions due June 1, 2018)

Fan Studies Methodologies, March 2020 (submissions due January 1, 2019)

Fandom and Politics, June 2020 (submissions due January 1, 2019)

We accept on a rolling basis submissions for our general issues, which always appear on September 15.

I. INTERNATIONAL FANWORKS DAY

What do fanworks mean to us? Apparently quite a lot of things! #WhatFanworksMeantoMe was the most successful of the OTW’s events for the 2018 celebration of International Fanworks Day on February 15th. Browse the hashtag on Twitter to experience all the different personal stories!

Communications worked hard on #IFD2018, and other OTW events for the celebration included IFDShare, a challenge to create short or quick fanworks, Feedback Fest, a celebration of fanworks through recommendations and other feedback, and games and public chat in an OTW-hosted chat room.

Fanlore also held an event for IFD, the Fanlore Challenge, which had a great response. New editors started Fanlore accounts and made load of edits to articles to earn shiny challenge badges!

Many thanks to the volunteers from all over the OTW who pitched in to help with planning, preparation, and hosting games in the chat room. Translation, in particular, helped make IFD a truly international event, translating posts into 24 languages!

The Organization for Transformative Works has not received any National Security Letters or FISA court orders, and we have not been subject to any gag order by a FISA court.
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